An Open Letter To The Presidents
Dear Presidents,
We write on behalf of The Steady State, a group of more than 330 former senior national security and law enforcement professionals. Our members have served under every President of the United States—Republican and Democrat—over more than four decades. We are former Ambassadors, Inspectors General, Flag Officers, CIA Chiefs of Station, FBI Special Agents, Defense Department and Homeland Security officials, and senior Intelligence Officers from across the national security enterprise. Collectively, we have spent our careers defending the Constitution and safeguarding American democracy.
Today, we warn you that the so-called Compact for Academic Excellence in Higher Education advanced by the Trump Administration is not a benign administrative measure. It is an indicator of authoritarianism. We have seen its equivalents in other nations: loyalty oaths demanded of universities by Nazi Germany, Stalinist controls over academic life, and the political purges of juntas and autocrats across Latin America, Africa, and Eastern Europe. The playbook is familiar—when governments coerce intellectual institutions into signing pledges of ideological conformity, democracy is already in peril.
The Administration’s demand is thus not merely an attack on academic freedom but a direct assault on the rule of law. To sign this compact would be to acquiesce in the very kind of coercion our criminal statutes forbid.
We urge you, as leaders and guardians of America’s institutions of learning, to stand firm and not sign the compact. Do not allow your universities to be used as instruments of authoritarian control. If you yield to this pressure, you will be complicit in undermining both the freedom of inquiry your institutions have long espoused and championed as well as the democratic foundation on which our Republic rests.
History teaches us that the first institutions targeted by authoritarian regimes are the independent centers of thought and debate: universities, the press, and the courts. Nazi Germany forced professors and administrators to sign loyalty pledges as part of the 1933 Law for the Restoration of the Professional Civil Service (Gesetz zur Wiederherstellung des Berufsbeamtentums). Stalin’s USSR imposed ideological conformity on universities and purged those deemed politically unreliable. To resist now is to safeguard not only your students and faculty but also the constitutional order itself.
We, who have spent our careers observing authoritarian movements abroad and countering them in fragile states, tell you plainly: America is not immune. The danger is no longer distant or hypothetical. It is real, and it is happening here.
We therefore call on every president of an American college and university to join together in rejecting this compact. Stand fast against coercion. Uphold the principles of academic freedom, institutional independence, and constitutional democracy. Future generations will judge our response to this moment.
Founded in 2016, The Steady State is a nonprofit 501(c)(4) organization of more than 330 former senior national security professionals. Our membership includes former officials from the CIA, FBI, Department of State, Department of Defense and Department of Homeland Security. Drawing on deep expertise across national security disciplines including intelligence, diplomacy, military affairs and law, we advocate for constitutional democracy, the rule of law and the preservation of America’s national security institutions.